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Friday, September 30, 2011

SciFi Friday: Mind Reading, Faster than Light Travel, and Other Modern Breakthroughs

The 1950s promised us a future full of robot butlers, rocket packs, and beautiful alien princesses. So far scientists have delivered on absolutely none of those promises. But they have given us some other pretty cool stuff, so for the (other) geeks home on a Friday night, here's some pretty cool real scientific breakthroughs:

While they're still working on verifying their findings, scientists at CERN recorded particles traveling faster than the speed of light, which would pretty much destroy everything we thought we knew about physics. But don't hurry to book a trip on the Starship Enterprise, because even if verified the particles were smaller than an atom.

Video Gamers were able to help AIDS Researchers unlock a protein sequence that had been puzzling them for years in a matter of weeks through an online game, using thousands of players brains to work as a cloud computer to solve spacial reasoning problems that computers aren't very good at.

And advertisers have developed a machine that lets them project messages directly into people's skulls, so there may actually be a little voice inside your head telling you to buy those cookies. Ignoring for the moment how terrifying that is, I can't be the only one who wants to play with one can I?